Designer / Narcoleptic / Pogonotropher

For the second time, I recently watched a BBC4 documentary about John Cooper Clarke (BBC4 documentaries are great, by the way – especially music-related ones). Cooper Clarke has become widely recognised, acclaimed and loved for his work at the intersecting fringes of poetry, punk and stand-up. He has carved out a singular place in each of those fields despite there being absolutely no precedent for what does, and when watching the documentary you quickly begin to see why. He’s incredibly witty, incisive and obviously talented. Hard-working too.

But the whole thing got me thinking about the implied inevitability of success that’s inherent in threading his story into a narrative. “Of course he’s successful, he did X, Y and Z and he’s talented, smart and hard-working. It’s inevitable”.

The one thing about it I can argue with is there’s no idea, nothing to engage people. And it’s every designer’s fault, whether you worked on the project or not (myself included), that the Yahoo logo is as engaging as a cup of milky tea.

I started carrying a hanky a while ago. I have since uncovered an unspoken brotherhood of handkerchief carriers among my friends. I want to encourage more people to adopt this ‘old-fashioned’ habit. After all, it’s quite clear to me that more hankies = less war.

There’s some really fascinating work going on in combining responsive web design thinking, big data and brand strategy/identity execution at the moment, but nothing that’s been acknowledged as ‘a thing’. So I’m going to clamber above my station and offer some ideas on stringing together this ‘thing’ and calling it responsive branding.

I keep buying books (especially design books) and not reading them. This is patently stupid. So to correct my fiscal idiocy I spent the weekend reading these. They’re wonderful. You ought to read them too.

Every day I go for a walk at lunch time. Very occasionally I’ll happen across a discarded item of clothing: a missing glove, hat, necklace etc.

This in and of itself is pretty unremarkable. It’s never anything that makes me think I should get the police involved; people lose stuff. The one thing I do find remarkable, though, (and what has prompted me to photograph said items) is that they’re very often adorning an inanimate object. I have a theory as to why.

People much smarter than me have defined the various permutations in numerous different ways, but I’m offering up a version here that makes sense to me, i.e. simple and relative to pop music (‘cos everyone knows about pop music).